Northern Royales vs Southern Royals
Mark Simpson, descendent of the horned, beastly Vikings, muses about the way England could have been if only his home town had remained the capital.

Independent on Sunday 18 February 2001

ENGLAND: THE MAKING OF THE MYTH FROM STONEHENGE TO ALBERT SQUARE, Maureen Duffy (Fourth Estate)

Pope Gregory was shopping in a Roman marketplace, which in those days (the 600s), were places you could buy real labour-saving devices - known as slaves - when he was taken by the sight of three beautiful boys for sale: "with fair complexions, fine features and noble heads of hair". The spellbound pontiff asked who they were and was told they were Angles from Northumbria. "Not Angles but angels!," he famously exclaimed (or perhaps squealed).

Maureen Duffy recounts, albeit more soberly, this story in 'England: The Making of the Myth From Stonehenge to Albert Square' as one of the founding myths of the English. For some reason this is one story I remember very well from my history class at prep school in York. Perhaps it was because when I heard it I was surrounded by fair complexions, fine features and noble heads of hair. Though in fact many of my schoolmates, like me, were not Angles but Vikings. York was occupied by the horned beastly blond ones in 865 and made the capital of Viking Britain, an event which changed English history. York, which looked set to become the capital of England, was supplanted by London, and, as we know, it was all downhill from then on.

But what an England a Yorkist England would have been! Southerners would have been the subject of mawkishly patronising films about boys tap-ballet dancing in outside toilets, while talking to people at bus stops would be the norm rather than a quaint provincial habit, and the Deputy Prime Minister would have a plummy Southern accent while the PM himself would talk like a merchant seaman from Hull.

Actually, now the Scots and Welsh have devolved, the South East has gone global and Euro, and the funeral cortege of 'England's Rose' disappeared up the M1 in 1997, it seems as if the North has quietly reinstated itself as the capital of England, at least emotionally. Most of the finalists for Pop Stars were Northern, the winner of Big Brother was Northern, Manchester United has successfully copyrighted football as something Northern. North Country folk The Royles, not the South Eastern Royals claim the nation's loyalty, and most of the soaps (except that unwatchable one set in Albert Square) are Northern. Not Angles, you see, but Dingles.

What’s more, I distinctly heard someone on Radio 4 with a Home Counties voice reading from 'The Canterbury Tales' in an assumed Geordie accent (in fact, as Duffy explains, the Geordie accent is probably the nearest thing to an original English/Angle accent today). That ageing radical populist Billy Bragg even suggested recently that York should be the home for a mooted English Parliament, something which would formalise politically the North’s rediscovered cultural hegemony (and for that reason alone Westminster will never allow it).

But whichever way perfidious Albion is now facing, North or South, Europe or America, it's clear that England and Englishness is up for grabs, hence the raft of books and TV series on the subject in the last few years, trying to cash in intellectually on what is happening popularly - something that is fast becoming the Holy Grail of the chattering classes. Few, however, with the possible exceptions of historians Simon Schama's and David Starkey's recent TV series, seem to have come any closer than Monty Python.

Duffy's deconstruction of the myth of England certainly hasn't. Politically it fails too. The prep school history she has in her sights, used - as she reminds us, repeatedly - by the Establishment and the ruling classes to justify their hegemony and the Empire, hardly needs to be 'debunked' these days because no one outside of prep schools is taught it any more (or if they are, they aren't paying attention, as a recent survey showing young people's staggering confusion of Hitler and Churchill shows).

Besides, post Thatcher, Diana and New Labour, the Establishment and the ruling classes aren't what they used to be, and the interpretation of English history offered here, is, post Schama, almost consensus.

The real - or perhaps last - enemy left-of-centre Duffy has in her sights are the right-of-centre Eurosceptics of her own generation who still hark back to a 'plucky' English isolationism, defying what they see as the creeping Armada of the European Union and the daylight raids on our manufacturing industry by the low-lying Euro. She dismisses their position, in a globalised arena, as nostalgia - but betrays more than a little in her own Old Labour tendencies (rhapsodising for example about 'the dignity of labour'). Finally, she falls into the trap of the meddling, muddling, do-gooding English middle classes: knee-jerk anti-Americanism (all those GIs who came over in the Second World War were so rude, except the black ones of course), and a moral compass which seems to have been found inside a packet of muesli. Or, ironically, from watching 'Star Wars'. In her final peroration Duffy calls on the English to champion the 'cultural rainforest of diversity that is the European ideal, against the homogenising impetus of MacSumerism.' (Feel the Force, Maureen!)

Pope Gregory was so appalled that the beautiful Northern lads he saw in the Roman marketplace could be pagan and not part of his Christian world, that he despatched his missionaries to tame the Angles and bring them out of the Dark Ages and into the light of European Civilisation. Though, of course, part of what attracted him to them in the first place was precisely the fact that they were un-tamed and Other.

And so it is with Europe today. The more we resist, the more they want us. Besides, on reading Duffy's prose this not quite so beautiful Northern lad is sorely tempted to avoid the embrace of Pope Gregory's descendants in Brussels, and look to the dark side of Europhobia and Uncle MacSam Vader instead.